I found this to be an interesting and pretty educational read on the issue at hand.

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Original post by shurcool I found this to be an interesting and pretty educational read on the issue at hand.

Interesting read, but he did miss a few key parts of engineering.
1. Different materials can have vastly different tension, compression, and shearing strengths
2. Shape has a major impact on those different strengths.

Make a post out of steel, and keep putting weight on it till it fails. Remake the same sized post out of concrete, and it will take more weight before failure. Now do the same thing, but have the post hanging from something, holding the weight up. The concrete one might even fail under its own weight.


You take a bar, 1 meter long, and of any thickness, compare how hard it is to bend. Now take the same metal and make a 1 meter long pipe. Depending on what material you made it out of, you most likely have a harder time to start bending it (but once it starts to bend, it breaks easily). Why? Because you are changing the engineering and how the stresses interact.

True, I also found it somewhat lacking some finer details.

However, it certainly helps answer the very basic misunderstandings most people seem to have.

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Original post by taby Quote: Original post by Stangler Quote: Original post by taby Quote: Original post by Stangler Quote: Original post by taby Quote: Original post by Stangler I would also add in relativity. A HUGE ship would be relatively small if moving towards you at high speeds. IF you are traveling alongside that huge ship, even if it is moving fast, it becomes huge again. Length contraction occurs in the direction of movement. The ship would have to be travelling transversely for you to notice. If the ship was moving toward you, then the change could be potentially measured by the relativistic Doppler shift of its emitted light, but it would not appear squished. I was really talking about the ship as a target of a weapon. In terms of actual volume, the length contraction does not actually occur. It's an illusion. The ship doesn't actually change shape. Once again I am talking about it as a target. The effective size of the target changes drastically. It is one of the major difficulties in an anti ballistic missile defense system as an incoming ICBM would be moving so fast that it is extremely difficult to hit. In space the speeds would likely be far faster so any attempt to actually hit something would be about establishing a matching speed and vector with an enemy. The computer software should be good enough to "undilate" the object in the viewfinder based on the known wavelengths emitted by the hull's material at rest vs. the observed wavelengths generated due to relativistic Doppler shift. Now that I think of it, I should probably patent that just in case John Carmack is working on something capable of these velocities ... :)

The technology isn't here now to do that with regards to potentially far slower speeds. Of course you can "invent" technology to overcome problems with physical traits. My assumption here is that this physical trait could be used to make interesting gameplay, not that this is a problem that has to be worked around.

Basically you are trying to solve a problem I don't think needs fixing.

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Original post by Stangler Basically you are trying to solve a problem I don't think needs fixing.

That's funny, because I think you're coming up with problems that don't exist. :) Have you stopped to calculate how fast would one have to go in order for the metre to contract by a mere 1%? (It's about 1/8th of the speed of light). You might as well be trying to aim and shoot at a photon... To attribute fun to an activity like that is kind of pointless, sorry.

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Original post by Edtharan So in terms of avoiding taking hits, even with the same acceleration, the fighter is able to avoid missile fire where as the Capital ship can't. Even with the same acceleration, the Fighter could be seen as being more "manoeuverable".

Unless the missile had a 1km radius :P

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Original post by Interesting Dave Quote: Original post by Edtharan So in terms of avoiding taking hits, even with the same acceleration, the fighter is able to avoid missile fire where as the Capital ship can't. Even with the same acceleration, the Fighter could be seen as being more "manoeuverable". Unless the missile had a 1km radius :P

Do you often kill flies with a shotgun?

Original post by taby

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Original post by Stangler Basically you are trying to solve a problem I don't think needs fixing.

That's funny, because I think you're coming up with problems that don't exist. :)

The problem I am talking about is one of the major hurdles to the missile defense system.